Now that the Baker Commission report is out, the new video of Mike speaking on Iraq is up. The Iraq War will be topping the news this week as President Bush does all he can to show he is trying to salvage the war.

There is a good commentary about the perfidy of some journalists in the Irregular Times. The columnist rightly notes: "It ought to be the job of the voters, not reporters, to decide which candidates are worthy."

Ballot access is not the only hurdle facing many candidates; filtering on the part of many news outlets is a major impediment. The media should go out of its way to do its job -- get unbiased information to the people so that they can make informed decisions when the time comes to cast ballots.

"It's lonely at the top" for Bush, writes first lady of the press Helen Thomas in her latest column, published in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "His hawkish
neo-con advisers are deserting him. He had to fire Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld. The Democrats have won control of Congress. U.S.
allies are angry at his Iraq policies. And even Henry
Kissinger -- one of Bush's foreign policy advisers and a key architect
of the Vietnam debacle -- has decided Iraq is a can't-win situation. . . .

"[But] don't expect any dramatic recommendations from the Iraq Study Group," she writes. "The nine men and one
woman on the panel are cautious Washington insiders who got picked for
the job because of their don't-rock-the-boat reputations. . . . The real solution is a cakewalk out of Iraq tomorrow. All it takes is courage."

Lykins does say, "given the Democrats’ recent history of sometimes
nominating someone coming out of nowhere, it’s hard to count either of
them out." But then he launches into the expected verbiage about Hillary, Kerry, Edwards, Barak ad nauseum.

If anything, the Midterm Elections proved that Americans want real change in Washington -- something only our campaign can offer.

Read the article here and feel free to comment on it on the Enterprise's site.

For more on the New Hampshire Institute of Politics' upcoming events, most notably Mike's speech titled "Stepping Back from Imperialism: Redirecting American Foreign Policy," see the institute's web site here.

The scholarly Foreign Affairs opines that George W. Bush's disastrous war marks an end of an era in the Middle East for the United States.

In the November/December 2006 issue, Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in an article titled, "The New Middle East": "[T]he American era in the Middle East, the
fourth in the region's modern history, has ended. Visions of a new, Europe-like
region -- peaceful, prosperous, democratic -- will not be realized. Much more likely
is the emergence of a new Middle East that will cause great harm to itself, the
United States, and the world."

Super conservative Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) has a column this week on taxes in general and the Fair Tax in particular. This is an issue that can appeal to everyone on the political spectrum as the income tax has become a bane to everyone from small business owners to those protesting war spending.